Geoffrey Wheatcroft, writer, and historian, noted in 2018 in the New York Review of Books that "the encrustations of mythologising and hero worship have gone beyond the point that they can be easily corrected". This phenomenon was neatly summarised in a line at the end of the 1962 Hollywood blockbuster movie, The man who shot Liberty Valance: When the legend becomes fact, [...]
Last Thursday in the United States, a special prosecutor, Robert K Hur, exonerated President Joe Biden on charges of mishandling classified documents in a report of more than 400 pages. But just nine words of it could mark the epitaph for the president and herald the return of Donald Trump to the White House. Hur (appointed [...]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWsTm6T3aOs
In 1969, Dr Elisabeth Kübler-Ross identified the five stages of grief as denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Fifty or so years later, Eskom added one more stage, six, to the national misery index through load-shedding, though our government remains stubbornly stuck in stages one (denial) and two (anger). On Monday, we were treated to [...]
Barney Mthombothi, writing in the Sunday Times, decried the decision of the Johannesburg City Council to rename William Nicol Drive in honour of Winnie Mandela. Having tangled with the lady in many jousts inside and outside parliament, I share his view of Mandela’s Janus face: a liberator of note coupled with her role as a [...]
A new word, “retcon”, has entered the lexicon, shorthand for “retroactive continuity”. American journalist Lance Morrow explained this week it’s a “literary device in which form and content of a previously established narrative is changed. Retcon retrofits the past plot to suit present purposes.” Retcon is a device for novels (such as when history is [...]
How, in the face of unimaginable horror in the deepest pit of a dystopian nightmare, surrounded by mass death, do you maintain a scintilla of faith and hope? That horror, the Nazi Holocaust and its factories of industrialised human slaughter, featured in several conversations at last weekend’s Franschhoek Literary Festival. The most direct and extraordinary [...]
February’s explosive eNCA interview with former Eskom CEO André de Ruyter sucked all the oxygen from the ailing body politic. Understandably, since his assertions on high-level corruption and criminality were entirely plausible. His claims on the complicity of at least two cabinet ministers, and the connivance of a third who ignored it, in the malfeasance [...]
In 1997, a decade before he became a global media star on CNN, Fareed Zakaria wrote an influential article for the journal, Foreign Affairs. Titled, The Rise of Illiberal Democracy, Zakaria’s article commenced with an observation from the hard-driving US diplomat, the late Richard Holbooke, who brokered a peace deal in war-torn, ethnically inflamed Bosnia. He asked of [...]
In April 1992 Britain’s most read newspaper, The Sun, hit its readers with a vivid front page on election day. Across a photograph of Labour leader and electoral favourite Neil Kinnock, placed in a light bulb, ran the headline: “If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights.” [...]
